Reading to Learn in Murdi Paaki: Changing Outcomes for Indigenous Students

Abstract

Despite improvements to educational access and retention of Indigenous Australians over recent decades, the school outcomes of Indigenous students are still a long way from parity with their non-Indigenous peers. There is an urgent need to challenge the common view that disparity in the educational outcomes of Indigenous and non-Indigenous students is 'normal' and that incremental gains are acceptable. Teachers of Indigenous students clearly need a more effective set of tools to accelerate their learning and close the gap in outcomes. Central to such a toolkit are strategies that can provide Indigenous students with the literacy skills they need to engage successfully with the curriculum at each stage of schooling. This paper reports on a teacher inservice training program designed to address this need across 17 schools in the Murdi Paaki Region in far western NSW, in which Indigenous students often comprise 50% or more of the student population. The Reading to Learn in Murdi Paaki project aims to improve the literacy outcomes of Indigenous students by systematically implementing an approach to literacy learning known as Reading to Learn, that has been developed with Indigenous and mainstream schools in Australia over the past ten years. A further aim of the project is to provide opportunities for Indigenous parents and community members to develop the skills to support their children's literacy acquisition and enhance their capacity to become active participants in their children's education. The four year project is being implemented by the NSW Department of Education and Training (DET) with the support of the Commonwealth Department of Education Science and Training (DEST). This presentation outlines the Reading to Learn methodology, how community stakeholders are involved in implementing the project, how In Class Tutors have been trained to support classroom teachers and the accountability processes of the project.

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